The Importance of WordPress Website Maintenance.
Maintaining your WordPress site is time-consuming and a little tedious. After all, isn’t your site there to serve you? Why does maintenance matter? A WordPress site is not merely a one-time build that’s ready to sustain itself throughout the life of your company, brand or blog. Just as a physical building you might make for a brick-and-mortar location requires regular maintenance to repair breaks, clean up messes and spruce up the landscaping from week to week, your website needs some routine care to keep it in tip-top shape. Your WordPress site should ideally grow and improve as your business does. After all, it’s your primary platform for promoting your brand and connecting with your customers. Neglecting any one component of your website maintenance for too long results in an adverse impact for your customers, security and overall performance.
Side effects of an infrequently updated site
If you go too long between updates or have been putting them off because you are overwhelmed with the amount of work that goes into regular updates, your site begins to show signs of neglect. Here are some of the indicators of an infrequently updated WordPress site.
Difficulty with Page Loading
Leave your site unattended for too long and bloat, like buggy plugins and unnecessary content, will bog your pages down. Long page-load times and crashing pages make your user experience unpleasant, and these issues may deter customers from learning about your brand or shopping with you in the long term if the problems are left unattended.
Bad impact on SEO performance
In addition to harming the user friendliness of your site, page bloat, crashes, and posts that contain broken links and other irrelevant information hurt your SEO over time. Your search rankings fall if unattended pages continue to cause problems with user interaction and page views on your site.
Run a better business
Clearly, no one wants to deal with the problems we just covered. And the solution – regular WordPress site maintenance – is a relatively straightforward one. Below are some of the biggest areas that you should focus on for your routine maintenance checks.
Product updates
If you sell products on your site, update product pages regularly to reflect the information and pricing that you assign to them. Product updates, photos and prices are all things you should monitor and update regularly for the best representation.
Boost social media shares
Not only does updated product pages keep your customers apprised to the most relevant information about your products, but they can improve the likelihood of getting social media shares and keeping your clients in the loop on commonly asked questions. Products that speak for themselves help capture more sales as you spend less time answering emails about product questions or outdated pricing.
Business branding
Since your WordPress site acts as your portal to the vast world of web customers, it’s imperative that you keep your brand information in top shape on your site. Keep logos and other relevant brand information updated regularly. Take time to look through your content to ensure it remains with your brand identity. Making a concerted effort to unify your brand identity across your WordPress site helps you to better connect with your desired audience and help you achieve better SEO rankings.
Security threats
Neglected WordPress sites are a wide open target for the safety threats of all kinds. From hacking attempts to transaction vulnerabilities, security threats lurk around every broken link and outdated plugin embedded into your site. Keeping your site regularly updated, as we’ll address in the next section, may deter potential security breaches and keep your information and customers safe.